H&M and Other Retailers Regularly Destroy Unsold Clothes

A Clothing Clearance Where More Than Just the Prices Have Been Slashed

By JIM DWYER
In the bitter cold on Monday night, a man and woman picked apart a pyramid of clear trash bags, the discards of the HM clothing store that reigns in blazing plate-glass glory on 34th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.
At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door. The man and woman were there to salvage what had not been destroyed.
He worked quickly, never uttering a word. A bag was opened and eyed, and if it held something of promise, was tossed at the feet of the woman. She said her name was Pepa.
Were the clothes usually cut up before they were thrown out?
“A veces,” she said in Spanish. Sometimes.
She packed up a few items that had escaped the blade — a bright green T-shirt that said “Summer of Surf,” and a dark-blue hoodie in size 12, with a Divided label. The rest was returned to the pyramid.
It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly.
A few doors down on 35th Street, hundreds of garments tagged for sale in Wal-Mart — hoodies and T-shirts and pants — were discovered in trash bags the week before Christmas, apparently dumped by a contractor for Wal-Mart that has space on the block.
Each piece of clothing had holes punched through it by a machine.
They were found by Cynthia Magnus, who attends classes at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on Fifth Avenue and noticed the piles of discarded clothing as she walked to the subway station in Herald Square. She was aghast at the waste, and dragged some of the bags home to Brooklyn, hoping that someone would be willing to take on the job of patching the clothes and making them wearable.
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Melissa Hill, said the company normally donates all its unworn goods to charities, and would have to investigate why the items found on 35th Street were discarded.
During her walks down 35th Street, Ms. Magnus said, it is more common to find destroyed clothing in the H & M trash. On Dec. 7, during an early cold snap, she said, she saw about 20 bags filled with H & M clothing that had been cut up.
“Gloves with the fingers cut off,” Ms. Magnus said, reciting the inventory of ruined items. “Warm socks. Cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fiber fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.” The jackets were tagged $59, $79 and $129.
This week, a manager in the H & M store on 34th Street said inquiries about its disposal practices had to be made to its United States headquarters. However, various officials did not respond to 10 inquiries made Tuesday by phone and e-mail.
Directly around the corner from H & M is a big collection point for New York Cares, which conducts an annual coat drive.
“We’d be glad to take unworn coats, and companies often send them to us,” said Colleen Farrell, a spokeswoman for New York Cares.
More than coats were tossed out. “The H & M thing was just ridiculous, not only clothing, but bags and bags of sturdy plastic hangers,” Ms. Magnus said. “I took a dozen of them. A girl can never have enough hangers.”
H & M, which is based in Sweden, has an executive in charge of corporate responsibility who leads the company’s sustainability efforts. On its Web site, H&M reports that to save paper, it has shrunk its shipping labels.
“How about all the solid waste generated by throwing away usable garments and plastic hangers?” Ms. Magnus asked in a letter to the executive, Ingrid Schullstrom. She volunteered to help H & M connect with a charity or agency in New York that could put the unsold items to better use than simply tossing them in the trash. So far, she said, she has gotten no response.
On Monday night, Pepa’s shopping bag held a few items. She pointed to her gray sweatpants. “From here,” she said.
How about coats?
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said.


nytimes.com

 

this is from H&M's corporate responsibility section on their website.
http://www.hm.com/us/corporateresponsibility__responsability.nhtml

What do you do with surplus clothes?We donate clothes that do not meet H&M's quality requirements to charity organisations like Oxfam, Caritas, the Red Cross and Terre des Hommes. Each store is itself responsible for clothes that are returned to it. Often there is an agreement that the clothes will be passed on to a suitable local charity organisation. Naturally we never give away clothing that does not comply with our safety requirements and Chemical Restrictions. Such items are destroyed.

 

H&M also destroys the items that are not sold from the designer collaborations with Stella Mccartney, Cavalli etc.

Target on the other hand donates clothing items to Goodwill and resells other items to discount stores such as Big Lots, Dollar Stores etc.

 

because H&M are hypocrites. this goes against everything they've been campaigning about for years.

and if many people knew this was happening they would want to shop at other retailers instead.

in fact H&M has a 'sustainable" collection coming out this season
you can check out their press release here.
http://www.hmthegardencollection.com/

how does this new collection "contribute to a more sustainable world" *in their words* if they are just going to throw it away if it doesnt sell?

 

Clothing Retailer Says It Will No Longer Destroy Unworn Garments

By JIM DWYER
The clothing retailer H & M promised on Wednesday to stop destroying new, unworn clothing that it cannot sell at its store in Herald Square, and would instead donate the garments to charities.
The practice was discovered by Cynthia Magnus, a graduate student at the City University of New York, who found bags of unworn but mutilated clothing that had been thrown away by H & M on West 35th Street. She also found bags of new Wal-Mart garments with holes punched through them.
After Ms. Magnus wrote to H & M’s headquarters in Sweden and got no response, she contacted The New York Times. More slashed clothing was found Monday night on 35th Street and reported in the About New York column on Wednesday.
“It will not happen again,” said Nicole Christie, a spokeswoman for H & M in New York. “We are committed 100 percent to make sure this practice is not happening anywhere else, as it is not our standard practice.”
Ms. Christie said it was H & M’s policy to donate unworn clothing to charitable groups. She said that she did not know why the store on 34th Street was slashing the clothes, and that the company was checking to make sure that none of its other stores were doing so.
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Melissa Hill, said she had been unable to learn why new clothing with the store’s tags had been destroyed, but added that the company typically donated or recycled such items.
One charitable program, the New York Clothing Bank, was set up by the city when Edward I. Koch was mayor to accept unworn clothing and to protect the retailers from people who might use the donations to get store credit or undercut sales.
“I would welcome H & M, Wal-Mart and every enterprise that presently is destroying new clothing to call me immediately,” said Mary Lanning, chairwoman of the Clothing Bank.



nytimes.com